Jeanette Winterson’s new memoir of her adoptive childhood in the Fifties
stirred up painful memories for writer and artist Jane Kelly.

Jeanette Winterson’s new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? was Radio 4’s Book of the Week recently. It made compelling but difficult listening. I, like Winterson, was adopted. In one chapter she recounts finding her real mother. I hate to be reminded of the misery that same experience brought me.

Admittedly, our circumstances were rather different; Winterson had the support of her girlfriend Susie Orbach, a celebrated psychotherapist (who once counselled Diana, Princess of Wales), when she met her birth mother. I met mine alone, aged 19, with no idea what I was getting into.

“You are not the sort of person I would want as a friend and I don’t feel like your mother,” she told me, damning me for good. This had a devastating effect on my self-esteem and confidence. I used to think, if my own mother doesn’t want me, who will? Winterson’s lost mother apparently wanted to include her in her family, but she backed away, fearing they didn’t have enough in common.

What I came to understand much later is that if you look for your birth parent, you must do so only out of curiosity, not because you want anything from them, and certainly not a relationship. Your “real” parent is the one who brought you up, for better or worse. You might not have anything in common with the person who adopted you but that is the strongest bond that you will ever have.

After her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, based on her childhood, and which catapulted her to fame in 1985, Winterson, then age 24, lost contact with the woman she always calls “Mrs Winterson”, her adoptive mother. It seems she found it easy to cut her off as she entered a world of literary success and celebrity lovers.

Winterson’s prose is powered by her “rage” at her childhood. She’s still furious with Mrs Winterson, who would lock her in the coal hole or put her on the front step. She depicts her as deranged; but if my memory of growing up in the North in the late Fifties serves, she was fairly normal.

I remember one amiable neighbour thrashing her children with a stick on her front step. My mother thought this was vulgar but didn’t disapprove in principle: no one did. Boys were caned at school and beaten again at home if the parents were informed. Corporal punishment was a fact of life, the only one you were told about. Parents were not friends; they owned you body and soul and were free to take out their feelings on you.

In lower-middle and working-class families, mothers were well-meaning tyrants. They controlled everything. Winterson’s adoptive father, like mine, was passive and haunted by the war; lots of men were like that. They sat and brooded, not sharing their thoughts, not even knowing that they were depressed.

These somewhat forbidding parents meant everything to you, but you couldn’t get close to them. This detachment was common in all classes; wealthy mothers from the Queen down sent their young children away to school, while women in council houses pushed their children away for fear of “spoiling them”. Love was considered corrosive.

So childhood in the late Fifties was bracing: buck up and shut up were the watchwords. Most children were well-fed and smartly dressed, but starved of affection. If you fell down you picked yourself up and tears were for sissies. There were few indulgent “yummy mummies” around. That was the culture. It wasn’t really her adoptive mother’s fault, but I think it still bitterly upsets Winterson.

“I will turn to women to find affection and touch and security that I haven’t had from the mothers,” she says. “They offered other things, but not that.”

Affection and even touching was just not done, between parents, parents and children or even pets. When I was a teenager I was given a kitten. I felt she was unhappy being torn away from her mother so young and I carried her around with me. My grandfather was furious. He kept saying, “Put it down for heaven’s sake. You’ll ruin that cat!”

What the result of that ruin would have been – a whole family destroyed by feline tyranny, perhaps – I didn’t ask. To him, my display of affection was immoral.

As an adopted child then, you were twice deprived of mother love, but adoption was not considered a factor in anything. There were no books about it. If you behaved oddly it was because you were bad – or worse, ungrateful.

Like many adoptive parents, the Wintersons wanted Jeanette to fit in and “be normal”. The word “normal” in the title of her book struck a chord with me. Studies have shown that adoptive parents are extra sensitive about their children fitting in. If you couldn’t do this, it caused anxiety expressed in enormous wrath.

At one time “normal” seemed to be my Lancastrian father’s favourite word. I remember hearing him tell my mother “she’s not normal” because I was reading, rather than washing up. He laced the word with such fury that I felt desperate to run away, to find a gentler, more accommodating place.

This quest for normal was tricky – you had to be average, but gained quiet approval from achieving something. You were meant to do well at school, without getting any “fancy ideas”. Mrs Winterson instilled into her daughter that she was very special, a future “missionary to the world”.

Winterson’s childhood was distorted by religious zeal. Her fictional mother, based on Mrs Winterson, comes across as a religious maniac, trying to force her daughter to conform with her evangelical sect. But most of my contemporaries were brought up in Christian households that would be considered strange today. You went to Sunday school, and were informed early on about Heaven and Hell. Sins such as lying and saying rude words were punished, if not physically, then by that terrible thing, the withdrawal of approval.

Winterson says that she and her adoptive mother loved each other but she had to flee from her and Northern culture so she could find “beauty” and love. She is beginning to have a relationship with her birth mother; they are “trying”. But it might have been more fruitful for her if she’d struggled for longer with the feelings she had for with the feisty Mrs Winterson.

My relationship with my adoptive mother has often seemed like a battle of mutual incomprehension. For 20 years I went my own way, but in middle age when I became ill and ran out of cash, she came to my aid. When I had an operation recently, she arrived, aged 89, to do all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and “normalising” – and entered a power struggle with the cat.

“Stop indulging her. Let her finish the food she’s got,” she’d say furiously, and I’d hear again that old worry about “ruination” caused by uncontrolled affection.

She and Mrs Winterson come from a different world. But in adoption, two worlds have to collide; there is nothing you can do about it. We communicate best by text, but there is a bond between us that is mutually rewarding and cannot be broken. And I hope to take care of her when she needs it.